Peter Tatchall: 'There may be a case for the people of Zimbabwe to kill Robert Mugabe'

Peter Tatchell speaks very carefully. He stops in mid-sentence to edit his words – "Sorry, let me rephrase that" – as if a conversation is a radio interview. Remember that when the famed campaigner for human rights says something truly shocking about what he would like to see done to Robert Mugabe. But first this thin, intense man is telling me the terrible things that other people would like to do to him.

"We are going to kill you gays," says Tatchell, reading from a transcript he has made of threatening telephone calls. "The punishment for sodomy is death." The calls have been frequent, usually late at night. He takes them in this musty room, where every spare space is filled with stacks of books or papers. They tell him: "You are going to be beheaded: that is the punishment in Islamic law."

I was going to start lightly, with a question about the Manchester Pride festival, where he will be on Thursday, arguably the biggest, most joyfully riotous celebration of gay culture in the country. I was going to ask Tatchell, best known for his outrageous direct action in support of lesbian and gay rights, whether the battle for equality had been won and it was time to kick back and party. But instead we're talking about death threats.

"I know that most of them are bluff and bravado, but there is always a danger that someone might be deadly serious and have a go," he says. I'm on a low sofa, trying not to kick over copies of The Humanist. He's looking down on me from a hard-backed wooden chair he has pulled close. He has an unsettling habit of keeping constant eye contact, except for when his energy or attention flags momentarily.

Tatchell still suffers headaches, blackouts and memory loss from his beating by Russian Neo-Nazis (and possibly secret policemen) at a Pride event in Moscow in May. The 57-year-old has been assaulted many times during 40 years of campaigning. Homophobic Muslim clerics with friends who like to call and make threats in the dark are among the more gentle of his enemies. Followers of Jamaican reggae were said to have taken out a contract on his life after he called for the banning of songs, such as Buju Banton's "Boom Bye Bye", that advocate the shooting, hanging, burning or drowning of gays.

The police gave him armed protection for a while, but it seems to have gone. The windows of his three-roomed council flat in a tenement just off London's Elephant and Castle are protected by security bars, and a notice on the front door warns that it is under 24-hour electronic surveillance. That stopped people putting dog-shit through the letterbox, but Tatchell is less than impressed with the official reaction to the latest calls, which have been going on for three months. "We have managed to trace the number to identify the perpetrator but that person has never been interviewed, let alone questioned by the police. It's an absolute fucking disgrace."

Tatchell is edgy. It's late afternoon and he has been arguing with officials all day in an attempt to prevent a lesbian being deported back to a country where she believes she will be executed. He has had no breakfast and only a "a small banana and apple" for lunch, which is not unusual.

"Some of the abuses these people have suffered are so catastrophic, they are difficult to block out. Until I can find some kind of solution they do play on my mind and I find it difficult to sleep." He looks drawn. "I'm getting into the Margaret Thatcher mode of sleeping for three or four hours a night. But I know I need eight."

Thatcher has an inevitable presence in a room whose walls are decorated with the ephemera of four decades as an activist. There's a Coal Not Dole sticker and a badge that says, "If Thatcher is the answer, it was a bloody stupid question".

Thatcher has long gone, but every radical figure needs a nemesis, and for Tatchell, her place was taken by Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe. Having supported the struggle for independence in that country, Tatchell found himself appalled by the President's violent persecution of gay and lesbian people, and his treatment of his own people. It was challenging Mugabe that also transformed Tatchell's public image.

He was part of human rights campaigns even as a teenager in his native Australia, but here he was long seen as a single-issue obsessive: in the Nineties, the papers called him a "homosexual terrorist" and "prize pervert" for seizing the Archbishop of Canterbury's pulpit at Easter and trying to "out" gay public figures with his group Outrage!.

Labour's victory in 1997 began a political shift towards equality, but the way Tatchell was seen did not shift dramatically until 2001, when he tried to make a citizen's arrest of Mugabe at the Brussels Hilton. The sight of the determined but slight protester being forced to the ground by the President's bodyguards won him many new admirers.

Last year, New Statesman magazine named him as one of the "heroes of our time", and The Independent included him among 50 men and women who had made the world a better place. So it is a shock to hear this lifelong advocate of non-violent protest say, in carefully chosen words, that he believes the problem of Mugabe may now have only one solution: assassination.

"The prospects for democratic, peaceful change seem to be closed, in the same way as in Nazi-occupied Europe," he says. "In all normal circumstances, I'm against violence. All violence. But in the extreme situation of a dictatorship where tens of thousands, if not millions, of lives are at stake, there may be a moral and ethical case for the people of Zimbabwe to kill Mugabe."

It would have to be a black Zimbabwean, he says, so the motives could not be misunderstood. "And preferably someone who had opposed Ian Smith's white-minority rule." This is not frustration then, or a moment of ill-temper. He has thought out the strategy. But still, it seems extraordinary coming from him, as if all the energy and fury that enabled him to challenge the powerful with nothing but his body and his willingness to take a beating has been twisted into the single, burning thought of a gun and an expedient death.

Not that Tatchell will worry about what it does to his image. He has never attempted (or been able) to make money from that, earning only about £8,000 a year from journalism. His colour-spattered tie looks like a relic from the Eighties and his red jeans and red shirt are not new, although they are neatly pressed. The long-life lightbulb remains unlit as the shadows darken, although he does switch on the kettle to make a good, strong cup of tea. And offers biscuits. He is witty and friendly, when he's not being recorded.

On Thursday, Tatchell will attend the massive Pride festival that will fittingly dominate Manchester, a city whose regeneration has been helped by gay culture. Sponsors include Manchester City Council (flying a rainbow flag from public buildings) Selfridges and even the Highways Agency.

After a carnival-style parade watched by "young and old, gay and straight, friends and family", Gossip will headline a concert; but there is also classical music, theatre and comedy, film and even sporting competition. Tatchell will speak on the question, "Queer human rights: what next?" In the midst of such a big party one answer would be, "Relax". But not for him. "There are unfinished battles."

Such as? "Imagine how we would feel if the black or Jewish communities were told, 'You're banned from getting married but we'll give you a separate system of civil partnership.' This is a form of sexual apartheid."

Then there are the problems in the playground. "A recent survey found two-thirds of lesbian and gay pupils had suffered homophobic abuse in school. A quarter had been physically assaulted. That's truly shocking."

The asylum system is unjust too, he says. "Time and time again, we see gay and lesbian asylum-seekers, who have been jailed, tortured and had their partners murdered, being told they are not genuine refugees and deported back to violently homophobic countries like Jamaica, Nigeria and Iran."

And it is a mistake to believe that the violence has ended here, he says. "About a quarter of all lesbian and gay people here have suffered assaults by homophobic gangs. We're talking about at least a million people. Over the past two decades, I have been physically attacked more than 500 times." When was the last time? Tatchell pauses, and clears his throat. "The last incident was about two years ago."

Things have changed for the better? He switches tack. "Yes. The decline of physical attacks on me is probably a rough barometer of the demise of homophobia in Britain. I don't want to diminish the gains of the past decade, but it would be a mistake to assume they are permanent. Let's not forget, Berlin was the gay capital of the world in 1930. Then Hitler came to power and gay and bisexual men were carted off to concentration camps."

Now he campaigns (for free) across a wide range of issues, including climate change and the need for an overhaul in our democracy, which he thinks will only be achieved by "a new mass movement such as the Chartists or Suffragettes". Despite this, he will stand for the Greens in Oxford at the next election. He just can't stop, and admits to working almost every weekend and evening, responding to 60 calls and 300 emails a day. "I don't have the capacity to switch off my mind to other people's suffering. I can't help it."

His heroes, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, had movements around them. Tatchell has a close circle of friends, mostly fellow campaigners, but admits he does not spend enough time with them. It sounds like a lonely life. "It's not lonely. It has been one of my great failings to not build a movement, but that's perhaps partly because I have been involved in so many campaigns."

Perhaps it's also because he's difficult to get on with? He ponders for a moment. "I guess I am sometimes driven." He has charm, but after two hours his intensity is exhausting. "The downside is that it has made sustaining a partnership with someone difficult. Who would put up with me?"

Have lovers come close and been put off? "Yeah." Tatchell smiles, but he does look drained. "I work the hours of two people. I do recognise the way I'm living my life is not ideal, by a long way. If George Soros or someone said to me tomorrow, 'Here is £150,000 for 10 years to run and staff an office,' I would grab it, and take the occasional weekend off."

His expression says we both know that is unlikely. "I have been unable to attract funding," says the awkward, driven, maverick Peter Tatchell. "I don't know why."

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